Should we be sending the elderly to prison?

From the New Statesman

With more old people behind bars than ever before, British prisons are slowly turning into dysfunctional nursing homes with a few visitors and a crippling sense of despair. While research suggests that the cognitive abilities of a child are comparable to those of the elderly, should there be an upper age limit for criminal responsibility akin to the infancy defence?

Thanks to our ageing population and the surge in harsher sentences, over 60s are the fastest growing group within our prison population. Over the last decade, their numbers increased by more than double, and by March last year, there were 102 prisoners aged over 80 and 5 who were 90 or older.

The problem lies in the fact that the majority of the older prisoners, particularly those over 60, suffer chronic illness or disability. Yet most prison estates are designed for the young and able. Norwich prison has Britain’s only elderly ward, and it mainly accommodates lifers. The multi-storey wards, narrow doors and the tough regime make for a particularly intimidating and inaccessible environment for elderly prisoners...

Read the rest here.

College courses creep back into prisons: A RAND study suggests the privately funded programs reduce the rate of reoffending.

From the Portland Press Herald

SEATTLE — Every week, they slide books through the metal detectors — novels by Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, copies of the U.S. Constitution, texts on sociology, psychology and comparative religion.

Then dozens of professors and instructors from Washington state’s public and private colleges surrender their driver’s licenses and car keys to an armed guard, walk through the detector themselves and pass through a perimeter fence topped by coils of gleaming razor wire.

They have come to teach some of the state’s most unlikely college students: men and women serving time for felonies such as rape, robbery and murder.

Many think inmates don’t deserve the kind of higher education that law-abiding citizens must pay tens of thousands of dollars to get, a view that led lawmakers, as part of a get-tough-on-crime push in the 1990s, to bar federal and state money from supporting college classes in prison.

But now, such classes are starting to creep back, operating on shoestring budgets with private money, in the belief that they will more than pay for themselves by giving felons skills that can help them get jobs, reducing the recidivism rate...

...Read the rest here.

'Fairness for All': Cuomo Seeks Criminal Justice and Prison Reform

From The New York Observer

Responding to the ongoing controversies over the non-indictment of a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, Gov. Andrew Cuomo laid out a seven-point plan to change the way cops and communities interact and to reform legal proceedings involving police-related fatalities.

Mr. Cuomo, speaking today during his State of the State address, asserted his proposals would help heal the deep wounds formed in the months after Officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a lethal chokehold to Garner, a black man, and after Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan did not convince a grand jury to indict Mr. Pantaleo for murder.

“The promise of equal justice is a New York promise and it is an American promise. We are currently in the midst of a national problem where people are questioning our justice system,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, told the Albany audience, alluding to similar controversies like the one surrounding the death of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. “And they’re questioning whether the justice system really is fairness for all. And whether the justice system really is colorblind. And that’s not just New York, it’s a problem all across the country.”

...Read the rest here.

Obama Calls For Criminal Justice Reform In State Of The Union

From The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama used part of his State on the Union address on Tuesday to call for bipartisan criminal justice reform.

Obama referenced the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York last year, and said that while people may have differing opinions on those tragedies, there is room for agreement on criminal justice reform more broadly.

"We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York. But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift," Obama said.

"Surely we can agree it’s a good thing that for the first time in 40 years, the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together, and use that as a starting point for Democrats and Republicans, community leaders and law enforcement, to reform America’s criminal justice system so that it protects and serves us all," he continued.

In the wake of unrest in Ferguson and protests across the country this fall, Obama formed a presidential commission to look at policing issues. The commission is expected to offer recommendations in March.

Watch the video here.

The End of Gangs

From Pacific Standard

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world? 

In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”

I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway. 

Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime...

...Read the rest here.